“It’s baffling that they can throw this down our throats, you know, and decide to protect another country’s economy versus protect our constitutional rights,” speech pathologist Bahia Amawi said of American officials who pass anti-BDS measures, in a video published Monday by The Intercept. (Photo: YouTube/The Intercept)

Texas officials are facing an onslaught of criticism after a speech pathologist lost her job at an elementary school for refusing to sign a pro-Israel pledge mandated by state law—a case that has cast a spotlight on efforts to neutralize the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which opposes Israel’s oppression and slaughter of Palestinians.

“The language of the affirmation [speech pathologist Bahia] Amawi was told she must sign reads like Orwellian—or McCarthyite—self-parody, the classic political loyalty oath that every American should instinctively shudder upon reading.”
—Glenn Greenwald, journalist and attorney

According to a database maintained by a U.S.-based pro-Israel group, through executive orders and state-level legislation, elected officials in 26 states have imposed restrictions on people who wish to back BDS—a movement that was inspired by the 1980s initiative that helped force an end to racial apartheid in South Africa.

As Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, noted on Twitter, legislators in several other states are currently considering similar “laws that subordinate Americans’ free-speech rights to Israel’s ‘right’ to continue the occupation without criticism or consequence.”

Murtaza Mohammad Hussain

✔@MazMHussain

A woman working as a speech pathologist in Texas was fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath promising not to boycott Israel. Such laws are becoming common in the U.S. for some insane reason: http://interc.pt/2EoOutW

The Texas law, passed last year, bars governmental entities from contracting with any person or company that engages in a boycott of Israel, defined as “refusing to deal with, terminating business activities with, or otherwise taking any action that is intended to penalize, inflict harm on, or limit commercial relations specifically with Israel, or with a person or entity doing business in Israel or in an Israeli-controlled territory.”

As detailed in a Monday report by The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald and a lawsuit (pdf) filed on behalf of the speech pathologist by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, critics charge that anti-BDS measures like Texas’s violate the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment.

“Texas’s ban on contracting with any boycotter of Israel,” the CAIR lawsuit charges, “constitutes viewpoint discrimination that chills constitutionally-protected political advocacy in support of Palestine.”

Bahia Amawi was born in Austria, but is a U.S. citizen and has lived in the country for the past three decades. Fluent in English, German, and Arabic, the mother of four earned a master’s degree in speech pathology in 1999. In 2009, she started working for the Pflugerville Independent School District in Texas on a contract basis to assess and assist children aged 3 to 11 as the region saw an influx of Arabic-speaking immigrants.

However, this year, after Amawi refused to sign the pro-Israel oath included in her contract renewal, she lost her job. As Greenwald, who is also a constitutional attorney, concluded, “The language of the affirmation Amawi was told she must sign reads like Orwellian—or McCarthyite—self-parody, the classic political loyalty oath that every American should instinctively shudder upon reading.”

One of the most remarkable elements of the oath Amawi refused to sign is just how specific and unusual it is. As Greenwald outlined:

This required certification about Israel was the only one in the contract sent to Amawi that pertained to political opinions and activism. There were no similar clauses relating to children (such as a vow not to advocate for pedophiles or child abusers), nor were there any required political oaths that pertained to the country of which she is a citizen and where she lives and works: the United States.

In order to obtain contracts in Texas, then, a citizen is free to denounce and work against the United States, to advocate for causes that directly harm American children, and even to support a boycott of particular U.S. states, such as was done in 2017 to North Carolina in protest of its anti-LGBT law. In order to continue to work, Amawi would be perfectly free to engage in any political activism against her own country, participate in an economic boycott of any state or city within the U.S., or work against the policies of any other government in the world—except Israel.

“It’s baffling that they can throw this down our throats, you know, and decide to protect another country’s economy versus protect our constitutional rights,” Amawi said of American officials who pass anti-BDS measures, in a video published Monday by The Intercept. Speaking of the example she hopes to set for her kids, she added, “I knew something had to be done and I couldn’t just let it pass by.”

Watch:

Responding to Greenwald’s report, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which defeated similar boycott laws in Arizona and Kansas earlier this year, tweeted:

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A a 9-yr-old female student has dragged the Ogun govt to court for allegedly violating her fundamental human right to use Hijab, demanding N1m.

The student of Gateway Junior Secondary School, Aisha AbdulAleem dragged the State government and the Principal of her school, Mrs. Kushimo before a High Court sitting in Isabo, Abeokuta.

Newsmen reports that AbdulAleem, through her father, Mr. Muhammad AbdulAleem, dragged the school principal to the court for alleged forceful removal of her Hijab and denying her access to attend classes in the school.

AbdulAleem, in the originating summon filed by her counsel, Olusoji Odutan, seeks the relief of the court to declare as wrongful and unconstitutional the action of the principal to deny her access to education on account of directive of the state government for non-usage of Hijab in public schools in the state.

Odutan said that the refusal of the defendant to allow her client to use her Hijab, violates her rights to “freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom from discrimination and right to the dignity of the human persons and right to education”.

The claimant in the suit number AB/5271/2018 also seeks for an order of perpetual injunction restraining the state government and its officers from further infringing on her fundamental human right to use Hijab.

Odutan prayed the court to award the sum of N50,000 against the defendant for serving counter affidavit on him on the day of the hearing of the case, as it will take time for him to study and respond appropriately.

Posted in AfricaComments Off on 9-Yr-Old Girl Drags Ogun Govt To Court Over Hijab, Demands N1m

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I was recently struck by a video by the French civic nationalist and anti-Zionist Alain Soral. I have to personally credit Soral’s videos, among other things, for breaking the mainstream conditioning which had prevented me from thinking outside of the liberal-egalitarian sandbox, so to speak. Hence, while I am quite critical of important parts of Soral’s thought, I am not inclined to be harsh.

Soral’s thought is hard to pin down (see my Alain Soral FAQ, written some years ago, but which I would say remains just as valid), being to some extent the product more of a confrontational and provocative style and a deep intellectual culture, than a coherent system. If I were to pin Soral down: the Franco-centric chauvinism of Maurras and the acerbic criticism of Marx, with a sprinkling of Alex-Jonesian conspiratorial innuendo. In practice, a glorious NazBol, with a seething hatred of bourgeois politics and feminism.

Soral’s videos, in which he regularly speaks for hours, commenting on current affairs and culture, represent a kind of counter-education or alternative viewpoint to the mainstream discursive flow. In this respect, they is quite like William Pierce’s legendary American Dissident Voices broadcasts in the 1990s and early 2000s. There is value in this. It is hard to judge the validity of the culture and narratives one is brought up in if one is never even exposed to genuine alternative viewpoints. Hence why the mainstream media/culture folks are panicking at the moment: they have been shielded from serious criticism for so many years that their memetic immune systems have grown shockingly weak. So weak they might just keel over and die tomorrow, tragi-comically, under a barrage of tweets . . .

I have not watched Soral’s videos with much regularity in recent years. Mostly because I feel he’s been repeating himself and his organization, Égalité et Réconciliation (E&R, Equality and Reconciliation) has been increasingly sinning by commission on race, rather than just avoiding the subject. Too often, Soral/E&R’s criticisms really boils down to “JR3”: Jews are the real racists. Many of Soral’s followers are incidentally black or Arab. Mainstream orthodoxy incidentally is refreshingly weak in many minority communities, as evidenced by the success of Louis Farrakhan for example, whose pep-talk preaching we could all learn from. I often find it easier to talk politics with a minority than with pious whites.

Soral recently published a characteristically provocative and vulgar video (I do not say gratuitously vulgar, in addition to being fun, this grabs attention and gets the point across) entitled: “Marx ****s Hitler.” As someone who has written a fair bit on Hitler, this certain caught my attention. This was all the more striking in that Soral has previously provocatively called himself a “national socialist” (by which he mainly refers to patriotic and socialist economics . . .). What’s more, Soral’s publishing house Kontre Kulture has only recently started publishing National Socialist historical documents, including Mein Kampf, Joseph Goebbel’s The Battle for Berlin, and the apocryphal Political Testament attributed to Hitler.

In the video, Soral claims that “right-wing and far-right bourgeois” hate Marx because “in the long run, Marx ****s Hitler.” This is because, in a market society, “the economic and social question takes precedence over and overdetermines the racial question.” Race-realists will rightly scoff at such a blanket statement, however, let us hear Soral out, for he has an important point to make.

Young French nationalist bloggers and YouTubers – most notably Daniel Conversano, whom Soral notoriously physically assaulted during a debate – have increasingly been talking about intelligence differences between races. Soral addresses this issue in his characteristic semi-non-committal fashion:

Today it is often said that thought is collapsing because of race-mixing . . . the migratory invasion from Africa, by referring to IQ. I don’t say that it isn’t a reality, but actually we didn’t really need them to collapse.

Soral adds that Western thought has collapsed since the 1980s, with the fall of the Soviet Union as ideological competition, leading to the disappearance of “Hegeliano-Marxist dialectic,” which he considers a valuable way of thinking.

I would agree with Soral that Western thought has been declining independently of IQ. Only in a sick world are Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman considered “thought-leaders,” to not speak of their French equivalents, such as the embarrassing Bernard-Henri Lévy, whom Soral quotes from a recent radio interview with the equally-Jewish Anne Sinclair (Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s former wife . . . it’s a small ethno-nepotistic world): “The Torah is the treasure of the Jews and the Jews are the treasure of the nations.”

As a good Marxist, Soral argues that political conflicts primarily involve class, rather than race. He says that during their teenage years, when high T-levels and parents’ pocket money mean one can afford to be irresponsible, young men can engage in apparently racial conflict. However, with age, they will mellow and end up defending their objective class position. Soral says:

The fashy [white] student becomes a bourgeois with age, who maintains his bourgeois position through economic practices which make him walk hand in hand with, let’s say, the Jewish banking high bourgeoisie and even a certain Arab, Saudi, Qatari, and Emirati bourgeoisie. Over longer periods, the logic of class takes precedence over the logic of race.

Soral then puts the names of a number of figures (Joseph Macé-Scaron, Claude Goasguen, Alain Madelin) who began in far-right groups (Action française, GRECE, Occident . . .) only to work with the mainstream media, Sarkozy’s clique, or even the CRIF itself (the official Jewish lobby). He then mocks the infatuation of many French nationalists for the Jewish French nationalist journalist Éric Zemmour and adds that Zemmour’s popularity reflects “bourgeois interests in a bourgeois, globalist, and also neoliberal logic and not at all a identitarian, regional, or national one.”

(I would personally say Zemmour is actually fairly good although it is embarrassing and inappropriate that the media has, for some reason, chosen not to make an indigenous Frenchman the voice of “French patriotism.” Imagine if the only “nationalist pundits” employed by Israeli television were, curiously, Christians . . .)

I would say Soral has a point. Certainly, when we think of who wields power in the world today, it is not a mono-ethnic bloc, but a coalition made up of Jews, whites (of liberal or big-business persuasion), and various nouveaux riches from the Third World. If one’s goal is revolution or even reform, one must also think about the interests and mentality of this coalition, rather than racial blocs alone. As so often, elites are what matter.

At the same time, I would point out that the phenomenon of selling out is as old as humanity. The rabble-rouser Sieyès, after inciting the mob to decapitate the Germanic-origin French aristocracy in the name of freedom, equality, and popular sovereignty, then happily became a comfortable notable under Napoleon. Every man’s gotta eat and the there are few prophets in the wilderness.

One may also ask: are people distancing themselves from racial politics because race is not a vector of political power or simply because, at the moment, race is so taboo that people need to distance themselves to make a living? I understand the problem of taboo is not unrelated to that of the ruling class.

Personally, I prefer Italian elite theory. The asymmetries are such that political change is always accomplished by elites, not by classes or races as such. At most, change is achieved by elites representing a certain class or race. In Germany itself, Hitler managed to achieve a political and cultural revolution through a deal with the military and the conservative component of the ruling elite, which led to the extermination of Marxism in Germany and to significant elite changeover. Real change does happen on occasion, although rarely, and invariably some people are never satisfied.

Personally, I am wary of revolutions. They almost always make things worse. Although given how bad the current trends are, I sometimes think an outright collapse would be for the best. In any case, understanding of elites is critical to achieve both revolution and reform: Are Western ruling elites, or a fraction of them, open to a demographically and culturally salutary change of direction? The cases of Hungary and Italy suggest this might not be impossible, perhaps even in the medium term.

An interesting question is that of Jewish ruling elites’ position in the West’s eventual identitarian turn. Traditionally, Jewish groups since the Second World War have overwhelmingly opposed all forms of Western ethno-nationalism, have promoted multiculturalism, have generally promoted ideologies ranging between libertarianism and social democracy, and, without regard for consistency, have supported Israel as a Jewish ethno-state. This has led to anti-Jewish attitudes among Western patriots and led many to adopt a hard-line position (e.g. William Pierce’s fable of the scorpion and the frog).

However, it is apparent that world Jewry is made up of different factions, in particular liberal American Jewry and nationalist Israeli Jewry, represented by George Soros and Binyamin Netanyahu, respectively. In general, these two sides really don’t come into serious conflict all that much (e.g. liberal American Jewry were happy to get behind the fraudulent Clinton “peace process” in the 1990s and force American taxpayers to shovel billions of dollars to the Jewish ethnostate every year). However, it is noteworthy that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has defended Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán from accusations of anti-Semitism and has said that his criticisms of Soros are legitimate. Time will tell how all this pans out.

I would add that in any case it is not fair that such a small ethnic minority should have such a veto-like influence over a nation’s politics and historical direction. The majority ethnic group’s representatives may well rebel against this situation before the century is up. We have many questions: Will white elites wake up? In the face of the rising tide from Africa and Islam, what position will Asia and in particular Chinese elites adopt with respect to race realism and white activism?

Contra Soral, there are situations of collapse when ethnic civil war takes hold and indeed blood or religion determines outcomes more than class. The whites of Haiti, Algeria, and Zimbabwe were exterminated or evicted.

Furthermore, it is clear that intelligence matters for much more than just the quality of public discourse. Race, biology, and genetic heritage set the basic foundation and hardware of human societies. In this sense, Hitler was really onto to something very important. Strikingly, the mainstream historian Yuval Harari has praised Hitler’s ideology for, if nothing else, trying to base itself in biological reality. National Socialism was unique, he says, in actually being a variant of “evolutionary humanism,” the ideology of the future, rather than the childish blank-slatist doctrines of liberalism and communism.

It is relevant here to point out that the two contemporary nations Soral has praised the most, by far, are Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela and Vladimir Putin’s Russia (he also lavishly praises “Best Korea,” but I think this is a semi-troll). The conservative and sovereign Russia of today reminds Soral of the Gaullist France of his childhood years. Chavist Venezuela in turn most closely reflected his NazBol ideals as a nationalist, socialist, and anti-imperialist state under a Christian, anti-Zionist, and charismatic leader.

However, Venezuela of course is economically collapsing. As a Mestiza nation with an IQ of 85, Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” has led to a regime of corruption and mismanagement on a massive scale. I say this without joy: I am quite sympathetic to the Bolivarian Revolution’s ideals. At the same time, I am also sympathetic to those liberals in Third-World countries who rightly sense that national and socialist boldness can only lead to chaos and tyranny.

A Marxist has no explanation for the success of economic national socialism in 1930s Germany and its failure in today’s Venezuela. Hitler himself would have no difficulty however. As he wrote in Mein Kampf:

In North America, where the population is prevalently Teutonic, and where those elements intermingled with the inferior race only to a very small degree, we have a quality of mankind and a civilization which are different from those of Central and South America. In these latter countries the immigrants – who mainly belonged to the Latin races – mated with the aborigines, sometimes to a very large extent indeed. In this case we have a clear and decisive example of the effect produced by the mixture of races. But in North America the Teutonic element, which has kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial stock, has come to dominate the American Continent and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood. (Chapter 11: Race and People)

In this respect, “Hitler ****s” race-denying socialists in general.

(I add that Hitler’s racial notions in other respects could be quite flawed. He was actually also right in observing that Jews are a racial/genetic group and not only a religious group. However, whereas he tended to conflate the Aryan, Nordic, and Germanic races, genetic science has since shown that “Aryan” Yamnaya steppe DNA is actually highly prevalent among the Slavic nations he held in contempt, second only to the Nordic and Baltic nations.)

While we’re on the subject of Soral, I also mention that he recently republished a blog post by Israel Shamir, praising Ron Unz in the highest terms, for highlighting the over-representation of Jews and the shocking under-representation of white gentiles in American elite universities. The word is spreading, trickle by trickle . . .

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In his recent article “Averting World Conflict with China” Ron Unz has come up with an intriguing suggestion for the Chinese government to turn the tables on the December 1st arrest of Meng Wanzhou in Canada. Canada detained Mrs. Meng, CFO of the world’s largest telecoms equipment manufacturer Huawei, at the request of the United States so she could be extradited to New York to face charges that she and her company had violated U.S. sanctions on Iran. The sanctions in question had been imposed unilaterally by Washington and it is widely believed that the Trump Administration is sending a signal that when the ban on purchasing oil from Iran comes into full effect in May there will be no excuses accepted from any country that is unwilling to comply with the U.S. government’s demands. Washington will exercise universal jurisdiction over those who violate its sanctions, meaning that foreign officials and heads of corporations that continue to deal with Iran can be arrested when traveling internationally and will be extradited to be tried in American courts.

There is, of course, a considerable downside to arresting a top executive of a leading foreign corporation from a country that is a major U.S. trading partner and which also, inter alia, holds a considerable portion of the U.S. national debt. Ron Unz has correctly noted the “…extraordinary gravity of this international incident and its potential for altering the course of world history.” One might add that Washington’s demands that other nations adhere to its sanctions on third countries opens up a Pandora’s box whereby no traveling executives will be considered safe from legal consequences when they do not adhere to policies being promoted by the United States. Unz cites Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs as describing it as “almost a U.S. declaration of war on China’s business community.” If seizing and extraditing businessmen becomes the new normal those countries most affected will inevitably retaliate in kind. China has already detained two traveling Canadians to pressure Ottawa to release Mrs. Meng. Beijing is also contemplating some immediate retaliatory steps against Washington to include American companies operating in China if she is extradited to the U.S.

Ron Unz has suggested that Beijing might just want to execute a quid pro quo by pulling the licenses of Sheldon Adelson’s casinos operating in Macau, China and shutting them down, thereby eliminating a major source of his revenue. Why go after an Israeli-American casino operator rather than taking steps directly against the U.S. government? The answer is simple. Pressuring Washington is complicated as there are many players involved and unlikely to produce any positive results while Adelson is the prime mover on much of the Trump foreign policy, though one hesitates to refer to it as a policy at all.

Adelson is the world’s leading diaspora Israel-firster and he has the ear of the president of the United States, who reportedly speaks and meets with him regularly. And Adelson uses his considerable financial resources to back up his words of wisdom. He is the fifteenth wealthiest man in America with a reported fortune of $33 billion. He is the number one contributor to the GOP having given $81 million in the last cycle. Admittedly that is chump change to him, but it is more than enough to buy the money hungry and easily corruptible Republicans.

In a certain sense, Adelson has obtained control of the foreign policy of the political party that now controls both the White House and the Senate, and his mission in life is to advance Israeli interests. Among those interests is the continuous punishment of Iran, which does not threaten the United States in any way, through employment of increasingly savage sanctions and threats of violence, which brings us around to the arrest of Meng and the complicity of Adelson in that process. Adelson’s wholly owned talking head National Security Adviser John Bolton reportedly had prior knowledge of the Canadian plans and may have actually been complicit in their formulation. Adelson has also been the major force behind moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, has also convinced the Administration to stop its criticism of the illegal Israeli settlements on Arab land and has been instrumental in cutting off all humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. He prefers tough love when dealing with the Iranians, advocatingdropping a nuclear bomb on Iran as a warning to the Mullahs of what more might be coming if they don’t comply with all the American and Israeli demands.

Meanwhile another Israeli, Haim Saban has performed similar work with the Democrats, contributing $5 million to their coffers, making him the top donor to the party. Saban has said that he is a “one issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”

Of course, one might reasonably argue that America’s problem with Jews who are passionately attached to Israel funding and controlling the major political parties is self-generated, that no one should be allowed to fund any political party to such an extent that one obtains control over policies. But that is an argument that will have to be directed at the Supreme Court, which permitted corporations to be treated as persons with its Citizens United ruling, allowing virtually unlimited money to flow into political PACs as a First Amendment right.

The lopsided wag-the-dog relationship with Israel is so dangerous to actual American interests in so many ways that the United States is now approaching a precipice and might soon find itself plummeting to ruin. Israel, not Russia, constantly interferes in the functioning of America’s remaining democracy. Fighting Israel’s wars and protecting it from any criticism have debased the value of being an American citizen and literally impoverished the country under a mountain of debt. The U.S. has been victimized by terrorism, much of which can be traced back to Israeli roots, and the Washington is now isolated globally as the United States has become more and more like Israel, a militarized state, politically corrupt and abandoning basic liberties.

How does one right the sinking ship? For starters, the Ron Unz formula for correcting the problem with China provides an excellent roadmap. Israel and its friends do not have a grip on congress, the White House and the media because they are wonderful warm people that others find to be sympathetic. It is difficult even to imagine a scintillating conversation with a malignant toad like Sheldon Adelson. Israel’s ability to corrupt and misdirect is all based on Jewish money, a process in which Zionist oligarchs buy their way to power and access. So the solution is to hit back where it really hurts – boycott Israel and Israeli products and do the same for the companies that are the sources of income for the American Jews who are the principal supporters of the Zionist project.

The United States Congress is currently moving to make it illegal to openly advocate boycotts of Israel or even to inquire about doing so, while 25 states have already also done the same to a greater or lesser extent. Last week a speech therapist in Texas was fired from a job she had held for nine years because she refused to sign an oath affirming that she would not boycott Israel. It is a measure of Jewish power in the U.S. that American politicians choose to provide cover for Israel’s misdeeds even if it means the end of the First Amendment and free speech. But punitive steps intended to intimidate any and all critics of Israel aside, there is no reason why consumers cannot exercise judgement over what they buy and what they are supporting through their spending. If you want to visit Las Vegas, by all means go, but don’t patronize the casinos and hotels owned by Sheldon Adelson, which include The Venetian and Sands Resort.

Democratic party major donor Haim Saban, meanwhile, is a producer of Hollywood children’s entertainment, including the lucrative Power Rangers. You can stop your children from watching his violent programming and tell the network’s advertisers why you are doing so. And then there are businessmen including Bernard Marcus, who is a co-founder of Home Depot and a major supporter of Israel, and Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. No one really has to spend $1000 to go to a football game, particularly if the owner is a good friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, and if you need something for your home or are seeking entertainment, choose to spend your dollars somewhere else. Readers can do the homework for the businesses and services that they normally patronize. If outspoken advocates for Israel own the company, take your dollars elsewhere.

As it is nearly impossible in the United States to vote for a politician who is in any way critical of Israel, those who are opposed to the terrible damage that the Israelis and their domestic lobby are doing to the U.S. can instead vote with their purchasing power. It does not afford the same pleasure as “throwing the bums out,” but there will be considerable satisfaction in being able to strike back against a powerful lobby that is so hubristic and insensitive to any criticism that it has become completely tone deaf.

Apart from domestic considerations, observers have noted that Israeli treatment of the Palestinians has been worse than apartheid under South Africa yet South Africa was subjected to multiple boycotts and bans on its participation in international fora, to include even sporting competitions. It is past time to do the same to Israel, which has been shooting dead hundreds of unarmed Palestinians for months now without paying any price at all. Boycotting Israel internationally is a good start. It is non-violent and proportionate and it just might be an idea that will spread and finally bring about some payback for what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabal of war criminals have done and continue to do. As the end of 2018 approaches, it would be something to look forward to if 2019 just might turn out to be the year of the international Israel Boycott.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is <a:inform@cnionline.org” title=”mailto:inform@cnionline.org” href=”mailto:inform@cnionline.org”>inform@cnionline.org.

Posted in USA, ZIO-NAZIComments Off on Boycott the Nazi regime and Its Friends

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London’s Camden Council censors criticism of Israel

In the wake of January’s terrorist attacks in Paris and the unprecedented mass solidarity with the right to “freedom of expression” as claimed by Charlie Hebdomagazine, it is quite distressing to see that Camden Council has decided to block the reputable website Redress information & Analysis in all the public computers of its libraries – a total of more than 100 computers – on the grounds that the website publishes material which is “intolerant and “anti-Semitic in nature”.

As a user of Camden’s public computers, I was appalled to learn in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza in July-August 2014 that I could no longer access my own articles which were published by Redress Information & Analysis. As a result, I lodged an official complaint addressed to the head of library services in Camden.

In recent years a number of websites have been blocked by Camden Council for criticising Israel’s policies. However, in the past, whenever I complained about the blocking of such websites, the then head of library services in Camden looked into my complaint and, after investigating, unblocked them.

This time the new head of library services, Rachel Brignall, who relegated my complaint to one of her managers, refused to unblock the website . Having encountered a similar response from Camden Council’s cabinet member for customers, culture and communities [Councillor Abdul Hai], I decided to take up my complaint with the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO), hoping that its investigator would look into my complaint and thoroughly examine the grounds for Camden Council’s refusal to unblock Redress Information & Analysis. Unfortunately, the LGO’s investigator, who took more than six months to respond to my complaints, issued a draft decision which officially rubber-stamped Camden Council’s decision to block the website.

Whitewash

My response to the draft decision of the LGO investigator (see below) clearly demonstrates the fact that the LGO’s so-called “investigation” was merely a whitewash contrived to lend authority to Camden Council’s unjustifiable decision to block Redress Information & Analysis. The points made in my response were as follows:

I was sorry to learn that you upheld Camden Council’s decision to block the Redress [Information & Analysis] website and would like to contest this decision on the following grounds:

1. You said in your draft decision that “the council has a duty of care to all its library users. It needs to ensure material accessed from its public computers complies with its Library Acceptable Use Policy”. However, nowhere in your draft decision did you indicate that you had tried to look at the material posted by Redress [Information & Analysis] in order to investigate the evidence and see whether the council has any grounds for claiming that the website is intolerant and anti-Semitic . In fact, the examples cited by Camden Council’s cabinet member, Abdul Hai, (letter dated 6 August 2014) include some lines from an article by Lawrence Davidson who examines the reasons for the persistently violent behaviour of Israelis, arguing that this “pathological disposition to violence will have grave consequences for Jews unless they take a stand against Israel”, as well as a post by another source [Tali Shapiro, an Israeli] which claims that “Israelis celebrate the slaughter of Palestinian children, call for murder of Israeli Arab legislators”.

I hope you would agree that the above examples merely express a critical view of Israel’s policies, as had been reported by various sources of the media, including the national press (see, for instance, this), rather than a genuine evidence of anti-Semitism or racist policies against a minority group or Jews . Moreover, Sam Eastop, Cluster Manager (Libraries), who responded to my initial complaint, seems to have based his argument that the website of Redress [Information & Analysis] displays intolerance against a minority group on a second-hand information, noting that he has been informed “that an inspection of the front page, for example, demonstrates a few articles that are considered anti-Semitic in nature”.

Likewise, Abdul Hai’s letter (6 August 2014) also seems to base Camden Council’s decision to block the website of Redress Information & Analysis on the grounds that “the site was also found to contain a number of violent images and at least one very graphic image of a mutilated body. Images of this sort do not meet the terms of use for public PCs in Camden libraries and alone are sufficient”.

Employing such argument as an excuse for blocking an internet website seems quite ridiculous since the internet and the press quite often include graphic images of mutilated bodies and corpses which could be easily accessed by the users of Camden libraries’ computers (as you know all the national and local press have an email edition which could be accessed by public computer users).

2. In your draft decision you state that “In July 2014 Ms X tried to access a website which publishes articles which are of particular interest to her. She complained to the council about its decision.”

I am sorry to say that this is a factual error as I made it clear in my initial complaint to Camden Council (addressed to Rachel Brignall, Head of Library Services of Camden Council, 5 July 2014) that I ask for the website of Redress [Information & Analysis] to be unblocked in order to have access to my own published articles there, noting that “Redress [Information & Analysis] is a very reputable and world-renowned website that had published a number of my own articles in the past and has always been kept accessible to Camden libraries’ users”. Furthermore, I included in my original complaint a link to my latest article in Redress [Information & Analysis] , entitled “Laying the foundation for Palestinian statehood”, which has now became inaccessible to me and all the users of Camden libraries’ public computers.

Who’s intolerance?

I made this point again in my email letter (13 July 2014) to Abdul Hai, Camden Council’s cabinet member for customers, communities and culture, noting that I find it quite surprising that the Redress [Information & Analysis] website was blocked on the grounds of being intolerant and anti-Semitic and adding that “I myself am an Israeli-born Jew and, as you could see from my complaint to Rachel Brignall, the website twice published my own articles” – attaching also a Redress [Information & Analysis] link to my article on Palestinian statehood.

I went on to say: “Perhaps I have to remind the members of ICT [information and communications technology] that Camden is a home for many communities who hold and express different views, and what is considered as “intolerant ” by members of ICT could be regarded as a mere criticism, or different point of view, by other members of Camden’s communities (as my published articles on Redress [Information & Analysis] website may obviously demonstrate)”. I have to add that my articles have been published on various websites, periodicals and books, both in a private and public capacity as a member of Jews for Justice for Palestine (JFJFP), Independent Jewish Voice (IJV) and Camden Palestine Solidarity Campaign (CPSC). I believe that Lawrence Davidson, whose articles in Redress [Information & Analysis] were cited by Camden Council as being intolerant and anti-Semitic, is also Jewish, as many thousands of Jewish and Israeli members of civil society in Britain (as well as Europe and the [United] States who have the courage and integrity to criticise Israel’s policies against the Palestinian people, in spite of the harsh reaction from the Jewish mainstream community, from which I have suffered many times in the past .

3. In your draft decision you argue that ”The council uses software to monitor the content of websites accessed from its computers. It believes this is the most practical way of making sure inappropriate material is not viewed on computers in its libraries. The council’s review of website Y found content which it deemed breached the policy.” You went on to conclude that “I am satisfied the council properly reviewed the website and assessed its content against the policy. For this reason I cannot conclude there was fault by the council.”

Ignorance

Yet, it seems strange that your draft decision solely refers to the policies and procedures used by the council, taking the council’s claims on face value without trying to access and investigate theRedress [Information & Analysis] website and check whether, indeed, the website’s articles/reports give ground to the council’s claim of intolerance and anti-Semitism .

Furthermore, the advice I received from the information officer of Liberty, (forwarded to you on 17 December 2014) regarding the blocking of Redress [Information & Analysis] quotes comprehensive guidance on “the management of controversial material in public libraries” published by the Museums and Libraries Archives Council in 2007, which says:

“It is the role of a library and information service that is funded from the public purse to provide, as far as resources allow, access to all publicly available information, whether factual or fiction and regardless of media or format, in which its users claim legitimate interest. Access should not be restricted on any grounds except that of the law. If publicly available material has not incurred legal penalties then it should not be excluded on moral, political, religious, racial or gender grounds, to satisfy the demands of sectional interest. The legal basis of any restriction on access should always be stated.”

What this means is that in order to comply with the HRA [Human Rights Act] , and with industry guidance, libraries should only block access to material that has incurred legal penalties or which is determined by them to be prohibited by law (so as to meet the “proscribed by law” component of the admissible restrictions under the ECHR [European Convention on Human Rights])”. The Liberty adviser, who did look into the material posted on the Redress [Information & Analysis], went on to say: “I have only had a chance to skim a few of the articles on www.redressonline.com; however, I agree that there is a strong case that the library has blocked political speech which is not sufficiently threatening, abusive or insulting to any religious or racial group as to engage the Public Order Act (or any equivalent legislation).”

Liberty’s view is also supported by the fact that the council blocked the Redress [Information & Analysis] website on 4 July 2014 – just when Israel’s raids on the West Bank, which were followed by its war on Gaza, started. It is also clear from Liberty’s advice that my initial complaint does not refer, or relate to, the breach of Human Rights Act, as you seem to maintain, arguing that: “Ms X contends the council’s decision to restrict access to website Y is a breach of the Human Rights Act. This is not a matter the ombudsman should consider because it is for the courts to decide if the council’s actions amount to a breach of the Human Rights Act.” In fact, my complaint is clearly based on my civil rights as a user of public libraries’ computers, as guided by “the management of controversial material in public libraries” (2007), and on being a taxpayer resident or a “customer” (a much publicly-contested term used by the council) of Camden Council whose libraries are funded by the public purse.

Only Camden Council

4. Finally, you maintain in your draft reply that “the council’s review of website Y found content which it deemed breached the policy. I am satisfied the council properly reviewed the website and assessed its content against the policy. For this reason I cannot conclude there was fault by the council.”

You will possibly be surprised to learn that, having seen your draft decision, I decided to contact a number of public libraries in London which I chose at random. Perhaps, quite expectedly, the librarian staff of those libraries, who came from the boroughs of Hounslow, Richmond, Fulham and Hammersmith and Westminster, told me,without exception, that the Redress Information & Analysis website is fully accessible on their public computers, and invited me to their library, after I told them that the Redress [Information & Analysis]website is blocked by Camden Council on all its library computers. Furthermore, a member of the library staff at Westminster (Marylebone Library) responded by saying that he does not understand why the Redress [Information & Analysis] should be blocked. He was happy to renew my expired user card of Marylebone Library ,and invited me to use their computers and access the Redress [Information & Analysis]website as much as I wish.

In view of the above-stated points, I hope that you would carefully reconsider your decision to uphold Camden Council’s unreasonable and baseless blocking of the website of Redress Information & Analysis. I would like to add that I regard my complaint as being concerned with a point of principle and, therefore, would be happy for the final decision to be placed on the website of the LGO with my full name and the title of the website in question (Redress Information & Analysis), thus ensuring full transparency and accessibility to the public and the media”.

Unfortunately, the LGO’s investigator seemed to ignore all the above-stated points of my response to her draft decision. This time she did not take a long time to come back with her final decision which simply reiterated the procedural points she made in her previous draft decision, stating:

“I have found no evidence of fault in the council’s decision to restrict access to website Y from public computers in its libraries. Therefore I have ended my investigation of this complaint.”

Regrettably, Camden Council’s decision to block the Redress [Information & Analysis] website, which was upheld misguidedly by the Local Government Ombudsman, demonstrates a wrong interpretation of the meaning of “democracy in action” – of which local government in Britain is so proud.

Posted in ZIO-NAZI, UKComments Off on London: Camden Council censors criticism of the Nazi regime

NOVANEWS

” … the attacks must have been the work of a highly sophisticated organization with access to advanced military technology …”

“Once we have concluded that the culprits were part of a highly-sophisticated organization, we can then focus on the Who and the Why, which surely would be of greater importance than the particular details of the How.”

The author is the founder and editor of The Unz Review, a leading conservative American political website. He is also a silicon valley entrepreneur, and a one-time candidate for the governor of California. He was once described as ‘the smartest guy in his class’ at Harvard (class of 1983). His biography on Wikipedia is interesting.

He is Jewish, raised in a Yiddish speaking household, and writes frequently on the Jewish Question.

Back in 1999 I was invited to join Steve Sailer’s HBD email group, where I encountered all sorts of interesting people. The participants were mostly intellectuals or journalists having sharply heterodox views about racial differences, especially those involving IQ and crime, and this was reflected in the somewhat euphemistic title, which stood for “Human Bio-Diversity.” A reasonable sense of the controversial roster is that less than a year earlier a founding member named Glayde Whitney had contributed the Foreword to David Duke’s 700 page opus My Awakening.

Although the discussions were intended to focus on scientific matters, it sometimes seemed that half the heated arguments revolved around immigration, and on that highly contentious topic, I was invariably outnumbered around 99-to-1, with even the handful of self-proclaimed liberals regularly ranging themselves against me. Despite such apparently long odds, I regarded myself as always victorious in all those endless debates, though I would have to admit that 99% of the audience probably would have disagreed with my verdict.

Particularly contentious was the question of Hispanic immigrant crime rates, which I claimed were roughly the same as those of whites, a position that virtually all those professors and authors denounced as utter lunacy. That particular dispute went on for so many years that eventually I no longer even bothered to argue the case, but just every now and then provided some satirical jibes on the topic.

As it happens, the late J. Philippe Rushton, longtime professor of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario, was a very occasional participant, and one of my jokes happened to catch his eye. Being a bit on the humorless side, he failed to comprehend that my remarks were actually tongue-in-cheek, and after three or four explanatory exchanges, I was finally forced to state my position as explicitly as possible: “Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age.”

He found my claim totally astonishing, saying that it contradicted absolutely everything he had learned about the topic and even threatened to overturn his entire ideological world-view, which he had so painstakingly built up over his previous thirty years of scientific investigation into human racial differences. Therefore, he said I couldn’t possibly be right.

Now Rushton was then widely regarded as being the world’s foremost White Nationalist academic scholar, and he was basically saying that he would eat his own hat if my contradictory racial analysis proved correct. Such an intellectual challenge was just too tempting for me to resist, so I took a brief hiatus from my ongoing software project to work out the crime numbers.

Sure enough, the quantitative results came out exactly the way I knew they would, and I was quite pleased with my resulting cover story “The Myth of Hispanic Crime”that ran in the March 2010 issue of The American Conservative. Not only did my detailed analysis eventually win over Prof. Rushton and most of my more thoughtful critics, but it also sparked an enormous Internet debate, and probably had widespread influence. I was puzzled at the time that such simple calculations had not previously been undertaken by America’s vast army of pro-immigrant academics and journalists, and could only wonder whether they had deliberately avoided investigating the issue for fear that the claims of their anti-immigrant opponents would prove entirely correct.Regardless of the cause, for years afterward whenever I Googled “Hispanic Crime” or “Latino Crime”, the search engine would turn up many tens of millions of web pages, but my own article was generally listed in the top five or six results, quite often in the top two or three. Even today, nearly a decade later, copies of my article still rank remarkably high in such searches on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.

Was my controversial analysis actually correct? Well, when I moved to Palo Alto in 1992, neighboring East Palo Alto had America’s highest per capita murder rate, which obviously made people here rather nervous. But then over the next 25 years, a vast flood of Hispanic immigrants, both legal and illegal, swept into the region, and the city became overwhelmingly Latino and immigrant.

Perhaps coincidentally, the homicide rate fell by some 99%, with the last two years marred by only a single killing, a murder-suicide involving a couple of elderly white lesbians, while all other crime rates have also plummeted. Palo Alto is home to the CEOs of Google, Facebook, Apple, and numerous other leading tech companies, so perhaps rightwing activists should be less than totally mystified why their anti-immigrant zealotry has generally fallen on rather deaf ears within the Silicon Valley business community.

Although immigration and Hispanic crime were perennial topics in that HBD group, for a few years after the 9/11 attacks the latter issue was almost entirely displaced by feverish exchanges on Muslim terrorism and the accompanying Clash of Civilizations. Once again, I was invariably on the short end of a 99-to-1 divide, with nearly all the others in the group claiming that destruction of the World Trade Center conclusively proved that we needed to close our borders to foreign immigrants.

I pointed out that since the Arab hijackers involved hadn’t been immigrants, but had generally entered our country on tourist visas, maybe the “War on Terrorism” should be renamed the “War on Tourism,” and we should protect America by completely closing our borders to the horrifying risks of the latter. Yet everyone ignored my sage advice.

The 9/11 attacks themselves had astonished me as much as everyone else on the HBD list, but aside from carefully reading the developing story in the New York Times and my other morning newspapers, I was too busy with my work to otherwise follow the topic. At first, everyone seemed certain that there would soon be a wave of follow-up attacks by the dozens or perhaps even hundreds of other Islamic terrorists remaining in our country, but nothing like that ever happened.

After a few weeks had gone by without any further explosions, even small ones, I told the other HBD listmembers that I now strongly suspected that every last Al Qaeda terrorist in America had probably died in the suicide attacks of September 11th, and there wasn’t a single remaining operative left behind to commit further mayhem. Many of the others disagreed with me, but as the months and years went by, my surprising hypothesis turned out to be correct.

There was one important exception to this pattern, but it actually served to confirm the rule. As I wrote a few years ago in my original “American Pravda” article:

Consider the almost forgotten anthrax mailing attacks in the weeks after 9/11, which terrified our dominant East Coast elites and spurred passage of the unprecedented Patriot Act, thereby eliminating many traditional civil-libertarian protections. Every morning during that period the New York Times and other leading newspapers carried articles describing the mysterious nature of the deadly attacks and the complete bafflement of the FBI investigators. But evenings on the Internet I would read stories by perfectly respectable journalists such as Salon’s LauraRozen or the staff of the Hartford Courant providing a wealth of additional detail and pointing to a likely suspect and motive.

Although the letters carrying the anthrax were purportedly written by an Arab terrorist, the FBI quickly determined that the language and style indicated a non-Arab author, while tests pointed to the bioweapons research facility at Ft. Detrick, Md., as the probable source of the material. But just prior to the arrival of those deadly mailings, military police at Quantico, Va., had also received an anonymous letter warning that a former Ft. Detrick employee, Egyptian-born Dr. Ayaad Assaad, might be planning to launch a national campaign of bioterrorism. Investigators quickly cleared Dr. Assaad, but the very detailed nature of the accusations revealed inside knowledge of his employment history and the Ft. Detrick facilities.

Given the near-simultaneous posting of anthrax envelopes and false bioterrorism accusations, the mailings almost certainly came from the same source, and solving the latter case would be the easiest means of catching the anthrax killer.

Who would have attempted to frame Dr. Assaad for bioterrorism? A few years earlier he had been involved in a bitter personal feud with a couple of his Ft. Detrick coworkers, including charges of racism, official reprimands, and angry recriminations all around. When an FBI official shared a copy of the accusatory letter with a noted language-forensics expert and allowed him to compare the text with the writings of 40 biowarfare lab employees, he found a perfect match with one of those individuals.

For years I told my friends that anyone who spent 30 minutes with Google could probably determine the name and motive of the likely anthrax killer, and most of them successfully met my challenge.

This powerful evidence received almost no attention in the major national media, nor is there any indication that the FBI ever followed up on any of these clues or interrogated the named suspects. Instead, investigators attempted to pin the attacks on a Dr. Steven Hatfill based on negligible evidence, after which he was completely exonerated and won a $5.6 million settlement from the government for its years of severe harassment. Later, similar hounding of researcher Bruce Ivins and his family led to his suicide, after which the FBI declared the case closed, even though former colleagues of Dr. Ivins demonstrated that he had had no motive, means, or opportunity. In 2008, I commissioned a major 3,000-word cover story in my magazinesummarizing all of this crucial evidence, and once again almost no one in the mainstream media paid the slightest attention.

Unlike the 9/11 attacks themselves, I had closely followed the Anthrax terrorism, and was shocked by the strange silence of the government investigators and our leading newspapers. At the time, I generally assumed that the attacks were totally unconnected with 9/11 and merely opportunistic, but I simply couldn’t understand how a few minutes a day of reading Salon and the Hartford Courant on the web could seemingly solve the front-page mystery that was baffling everyone at the FBI and the New York Times.It was around that point when I first started to wonder whether the elite media publications I had always relied upon were merely “Our American Pravda” under a different name. Moreover, a 2014 book by Prof. Graeme MacQueen that I only very recently discovered has made a reasonably persuasive case that the Anthrax killings were intimately connected to the 9/11 attacks themselves, greatly magnifying the malfeasance of our media elites.

In theoretical physics, new scientific breakthroughs often occur when known objects are found to behave in inexplicable ways, thereby suggesting the existence of previously unsuspected forces or particles. In evolutionary biology, when an organism appears to be acting against its own genetic interests, we may safely assume that it has probably fallen under the control of some other entity, typically a parasite, which has hijacked the host and is directing its activities toward different ends. While I couldn’t be entirely sure what was happening to the politics and media of my own country, something very odd and disturbing was certainly taking place.

Things soon became much worse. Since the 9/11 attacks had apparently been organized by Osama bin Laden and he was based in Afghanistan under Taliban protection, our attack on that country at least seemed rational. But suddenly there also soon appeared talk of attacking Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

At first I couldn’t believe what was taking place, simply awed by the breathtaking power and dishonesty of “our American Pravda,” with the establishment media so easily transforming black into white and night into day. Once again, quoting from my original article of that title:

The circumstances surrounding our Iraq War demonstrate this, certainly ranking it among the strangest military conflicts of modern times. The 2001 attacks in America were quickly ascribed to the radical Islamists of al-Qaeda, whose bitterest enemy in the Middle East had always been Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime in Iraq.

Yet through misleading public statements, false press leaks, and even forged evidence such as the “yellowcake” documents, the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies utilized the compliant American media to persuade our citizens that Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs posed a deadly national threat and required elimination by war and invasion. Indeed, for several years national polls showed that a large majority of conservatives and Republicans actually believed that Saddam was the mastermind behind 9/11 and the Iraq War was being fought as retribution. Consider how bizarre the history of the 1940s would seem if America had attacked China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor.

True facts were easily available to anyone paying attention in the years after 2001, but most Americans do not bother and simply draw their understanding of the world from what they are told by the major media, which overwhelmingly—almost uniformly—backed the case for war with Iraq; the talking heads on TV created our reality.

Prominent journalists across the liberal and conservative spectrum eagerly published the most ridiculous lies and distortions passed on to them by anonymous sources, and stampeded Congress down the path to war.

The result was what my late friend Lt. Gen. Bill Odom rightly called the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history.” American forces suffered tens of thousands of needless deaths and injuries, while our country took a huge step toward national bankruptcy. Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and others have estimated that with interest the total long-term cost of our two recent wars may reach as high as $5 or $6 trillion, or as much as $50,000 per American household, mostly still unpaid.

Meanwhile, economist Edward Wolff has calculated that the Great Recession and its aftermath cut the personal net worth of the median American household to $57,000 in 2010 from a figure nearly twice as high three years earlier. Comparing these assets and liabilities, we see that the American middle class now hovers on the brink of insolvency, with the cost of our foreign wars being a leading cause.

But no one involved in the debacle ultimately suffered any serious consequences, and most of the same prominent politicians and highly paid media figures who were responsible remain just as prominent and highly paid today. For most Americans, reality is whatever our media organs tell us, and since these have largely ignored the facts and adverse consequences of our wars in recent years, the American people have similarly forgotten. Recent polls show that only half the public today believes that the Iraq War was a mistake.

Author James Bovard has described our society as an “attention deficit democracy,” and the speed with which important events are forgotten once the media loses interest might surprise George Orwell.

As President George W. Bush began inexorably moving America toward the Iraq War in 2002, I realized with a terrible sinking feeling that the notoriously pro-Israel Neocon zealots had somehow managed to seize control of the foreign policy of his administration, a situation I could never have imagined even in my worst nightmare.

Throughout the 1990s and even afterward, I’d been on very friendly terms with the Neocons in NYC and DC, working closely with them on issues relating to immigration and assimilation. Indeed, my December 1999 article “California and the End of White America”was not only one of the longest cover stories ever published in Commentary, their intellectual flagship, but had even been cited as the centerpiece of its annual fund-raising letter.I and my other DC friends were well aware of the fanatical views most Neocons held on Israel and Middle Eastern policy, with their foreign policy obsessions being a regular staple of our jokes and ridicule. But since it seemed unimaginable that they would ever be given any authority in that sphere, their beliefs had seemed a relatively harmless eccentricity. After all, could anyone possibly imagine fanatical libertarians being placed in total control of the Pentagon, allowing them to immediately disband the American armed forces as a “statist institution”?

Moreover, the complete ideological triumph of the Neocons after the 9/11 attacks was all the more shocking given the crushing recent defeat they had suffered. During the 2000 presidential campaign, nearly all of the Neocons had aligned themselves with Sen. John McCain, whose battle with Bush for the Republican nomination had eventually turned quite bitter, and as a consequence, they had been almost totally frozen out of high-level appointments.

Both Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were then widely regarded as Bush Republicans, lacking any significant Neocon ties, and the same was true for all the other top administration figures such as Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice, and Paul O’Neil. Indeed, the only Neoconservative offered a Cabinet spot was Linda Chavez, and not only was the Labor Department always regarded as something of a boobie prize in a GOP Administration, but she was ultimately forced to withdraw her nomination due to her “nanny problems.” The highest-ranking Neocon serving under Bush was Rumsfeld Deputy Paul Wolfowitz, whose seemingly inconsequential appointment had passed without any notice.

Most of the Neocons themselves certainly seemed to recognize the catastrophic loss they had suffered in the 2000 election. Back in those days, I was on very friendly terms with Bill Kristol, and when I stopped by his office at the Weekly Standard for a chat in the spring of 2001, he seemed in a remarkably depressed state of mind. I remember that at one point, he took his head in his hands and wondered aloud whether it was time for him to just abandon the political battle, resigning his editorship and taking up a quiet post at a DC thinktank.Yet just eight or ten months later, he and his close allies were on their way to gaining overwhelming influence in our government. In an eerie parallel to the aftermath of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin in Zurich, the totally fortuitous 9/11 attacks and the outbreak of war had suddenly allowed a small but committed ideological faction to seize control of a gigantic country.

A thorough account of the Neocons and their takeover of the Bush Administration in the aftermath of 9/11 is provided by Dr. Stephen J. Sniegoski in his 2008 book The Transparent Cabal, conveniently available on this website:

Oddly enough, for many years after 9/11, I paid very little attention to the details of the attacks themselves. I was entirely preoccupied with building my content-archiving software system, and with the little time I could spend on public policy matters, I was totally focused to the ongoing Iraq War disaster, as well as my terrible fears that Bush might at any moment suddenly extend the conflict to Iran. Despite Neocon lies shamelessly echoed by our corrupt media, neither Iraq nor Iran had had anything whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks, so those events gradually faded in my consciousness, and I suspect the same was true for most other Americans.

Al Qaeda had largely disappeared and Bin Laden was supposedly hiding in a cave somewhere. Despite endless Homeland Security “threat alerts,” there had been absolutely no further Islamic terrorism on American soil, and relatively little anywhere else outside the Iraq charnel house. So the precise details of the 9/11 plots had become almost irrelevant to me.

Others I knew seemed to feel the same way. Virtually all the exchanges I had with my old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who had run the NSA for Ronald Reagan, had concerned the Iraq War and risk it might spread to Iran, as well as the bitter anger he felt toward Bush’s perversion of his beloved NSA into an extra-constitutional tool of domestic espionage.

When the New York Times broke the story of the massive extent of domestic NSA spying, Gen. Odom declared that President Bush should be impeached and NSA Director Michael Hayden court-martialed. But in all the years prior to his untimely passing in 2008, I don’t recall the 9/11 attacks themselves even once coming up as a topic in our discussions.

During those same years, I’d also grown quite friendly with Alexander Cockburn, whose Counterpunch webzine seemed a very rare center of significant opposition to our disastrous foreign policy towards Iraq and Iran. I do recall that he once complained to me in 2006 about the “conspiracy nuts” of the 9/11 Truth movement who were endlessly harassing his publication, and I extended my sympathies. Each of us move in different political circles, and that brief reference may have been the first and only time I heard of the 9/11 Truthers during that period, causing me to regard them more like an eccentric UFO cult than anything else.

Admittedly, I’d occasionally heard of some considerable oddities regarding the 9/11 attacks here and there, and these certainly raised some suspicions. Most days I would glance at the Antiwar.com front page, and it seemed that some Israeli Mossad agents had been caught while filming that plane attacks in NYC, while a much larger Mossad “art student” spy operation around the country had also been broken up around the same time. Apparently, FoxNews had even broadcast a multi-part series on the latter topic before that expose was scuttled and “disappeared” under ADL pressure.

Although I wasn’t entirely sure about the credibility of those claims, it did seem plausible that Mossad had known of the attacks in advance and allowed them to proceed, recognizing the huge benefits that Israel would derive from the anti-Arab backlash. I think I was vaguely aware that Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo had published The Terror Enigma, a short book about some of those strange facts, bearing the provocative subtitle “9/11 and the Israeli Connection,” but I never considered reading it.In 2007, Counterpunch itself published a fascinating follow-up story about the arrest of that group of Israeli Mossad agents in NYC, who were caught filming and apparently celebrating the plane attacks on that fateful day, and the Mossad activity seemed to be far larger than I had previously realized. But all these details remained a little fuzzy in my mind next to my overriding concerns about wars in Iraq and Iran.

However, by the end of 2008 my focus had begun to change. Bush was leaving office without having started an Iranian war, and America had successfully dodged the bullet of an even more dangerous John McCain administration. I assumed that Barack Obama would be a terrible president and he proved worse than my expectations, but I still breathed a huge sigh of relief every day that he was in the White House.

Moreover, around that same time I’d stumbled across an astonishing detail of the 9/11 attacks that demonstrated the remarkable depths of my own ignorance. In a Counterpunch article, I’d discovered that immediately following the attacks, the supposed terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden had publicly denied any involvement, even declaring that no good Muslim would have committed such deeds.

Once I checked around a little and fully confirmed that fact, I was flabbergasted. 9/11 was not only the most successful terrorist attack in the history of the world, but may have been greater in its physical magnitude than all past terrorist operations combined. The entire purpose of terrorism is to allow a small organization to show the world that it can inflict serious losses upon a powerful state, and I had never previously heard of any terrorist leader denying his role in a successful operation, let alone the greatest in history.

Something seemed extremely wrong in the media-generated narrative that I had previously accepted. I began to wonder if I had been as deluded as the tens of millions of Americans in 2003 and 2004 who naively believed that Saddam had been the mastermind behind the September 11th attacks. We live in a world of illusions generated by our media, and I suddenly felt that I had noticed a tear in the paper-mache mountains displayed in the background of a Hollywood sound-stage. If Osama was probably not the author of 9/11, what other huge falsehoods had I blindly accepted?

A couple of years later, I came across a very interesting column by Eric Margolis, a prominent Canadian foreign policy journalist purged from the broadcast media for his strong opposition to the Iraq War. He had long published a weekly column in the Toronto Sun and when that tenure ended, he used his closing appearance to run a double-length piece expressing his very strong doubts about the official 9/11 story, noting that the former director of Pakistani Intelligence insisted that Israel had been behind the attacks.

In addition, an old friend of mine with strong connections to elite French circles at some point shared what he regarded as an amusing anecdote. He mentioned that at a private dinner party in Paris attended by influential political and media figures, France’s former Defense Minister had told the other disbelieving guests that the Pentagon had been struck by a missile rather than a civilian jetliner. My friend explained that the minister in question was widely regarded as extremely intelligent and level-headed, thereby proving that even the most highly reputable individuals may sometimes believe in utterly crazy things.But I interpreted those same facts very differently. France probably possessed one of the four or five best intelligence service in the world, and surely a French Defense Minister would be privy to better information about true events than a typical media pundit. In fact, one of the earliest books sharply questioning the official 9/11 narrative was 9/11: The Big Lie by French journalist Thierry Meyssan, which appeared in 2002. This book had similarly argued that the Pentagon had been struck by a missile, perhaps suggesting that it may have been partly influenced by leaks coming from French Intelligence.

I later shared that account of the French minister’s private opinions with a very well-connected American individual situated in our elite Establishment with whom I’d become a little friendly. His reaction made it clear that he held the same highly unorthodox views about the 9/11 attacks, although he had never publicly voiced them lest he risk losing his elite Establishment membership card.

I eventually discovered that in 2003 former German Cabinet Minister Andreas von Bülow had published a best-selling book strongly suggesting that the CIA rather than Bin Laden was behind the attacks, while in 2007 former Italian President Francesco Cossiga had similarly argued that the CIA and the Israeli Mossad had been responsible, claiming that fact was well known among Western intelligence agencies.

Over the years, all these discordant claims had gradually raised my suspicions about the official 9/11 story to extremely strong levels, but it was only very recently that I finally found the time to begin to seriously investigate the subject and read eight or ten of the main 9/11 Truther books, mostly those by Prof. David Ray Griffin, the widely acknowledged leader in that field. And his books, together with the writings of his numerous colleagues and allies, revealed all sorts of very telling details, most of which had previously remained unknown to me. I was also greatly impressed by the sheer number of seemingly reputable individuals of no apparent ideological bent who had become adherents of the 9/11 Truth movement over the years.

I certainly attempted to locate contrary books supporting the official 9/11 story, but the only one widely discussed was a rather short volume published by Popular Mechanics magazine, whose lead researcher turned out to be the cousin of Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff. None of the writers appeared to have any serious academic credentials, and they seemed to generally ignore or deflect some of the strongest pieces of evidence provided by the numerous scholars and experts involved in the 9/11 Truth movement.Therefore I hardly found their rebuttal persuasive, and I half-wondered whether Homeland Security had quietly arranged the publication, which might help explain the extremely odd nepotistic coincidence. Popular magazines simply do not carry the scientific weight of research professors at major universities. Perhaps the holes in the official 9/11 narrative were so numerous and large that no serious scholar could be enlisted to defend it.

When utterly astonishing claims of an extremely controversial nature are made over a period of many years by numerous seemingly reputable academics and other experts, and they are entirely ignored or suppressed but never effectively refuted, reasonable conclusions seem to point in an obvious direction. Based on my very recent readings in this topic, the total number of huge flaws in the official 9/11 story has now grown enormously long, probably numbering in the many dozens. Most of these individual items seem reasonably likely and if we decide that even just two or three of them are correct, we must totally reject the narrative that so many of us have believed for so long.The numerous Griffin books, beginning with his important 2004 volume The New Pearl Harbor, provide a very helpful evolving compendium of these. Although they all contain a great deal of overlap I might emphasize Debunking 9/11 Debunking, a 2007 reply to the Popular Mechanics volume, and the 2008 book The New Pearl Harbor Revisited as among the more important ones. In addition, he co-edited an important 2007 collection of essays with scholar Peter Dale Scott entitled 9/11 and American Empire. For those too cheap or impatient to click a button and order something from Amazon, I’m pleased to provide three of the shorter Griffin books in HTML form:

Now I am obviously just an amateur in the complex intelligence craft of extracting nuggets of truth from a mountain of manufactured falsehood. Although the arguments of the 9/11 Truth Movement seem quite persuasive to me, I would obviously feel much more comfortable if they were seconded by an experienced professional, such as a top CIA analyst. A few years ago, I was shocked to discover that was indeed the case.

William Christison had spent 29 years at the CIA, rising to become one of its senior figures as Director of its Office of Regional and Political Analysis, with 200 research analysts serving under him. In August 2006, he published a remarkable 2,700 word article explaining why he no longer believed the official 9/11 story and felt sure that the 9/11 Commission Report constituted a cover-up, with the truth being quite different.

We might expect that if a former intelligence officer of Christison’s rank were to denounce the official 9/11 report as a fraud and a cover-up, such a story would constitute front-page news. But it was never reported anywhere in our mainstream media, and I only stumbled upon it a decade later.

Even our supposed “alternative” media outlets were nearly as silent. Throughout the 2000s, Christison and his wife Kathleen, also a former CIA analyst, had been regular contributors to Counterpunch, publishing many dozens of articles there and certainly were its most highly-credentialed writers on intelligence and national security matters.

But editor Alexander Cockburn refused to publish any of their 9/11 skepticism, so it never came to my attention at the time. Indeed, when I mentioned Christison’s views to current Counterpunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair a couple of years ago, he was stunned to discover that the friend he had regarded so very highly had actually become a “9/11 Truther.” When media organs serve as ideological gatekeepers, a condition of widespread ignorance becomes unavoidable.

With so many gaping holes in the official story of the events seventeen years ago, each of us is free to choose to focus on those we personally consider most persuasive, and I have several of my own. Danish Chemistry professor Niels Harrit was one of the scientists who analyzed the debris of the destroyed buildings and detected the residual presence of nano-thermite, a military-grade explosive compound, and I found him quite credible during his hour-long interview on Red Ice Radio.

The notion that an undamaged hijacker passport was found in an NYC street after the massive, fiery destruction of the skyscrapers is totally absurd, as was the claim that the top hijacker conveniently lost his luggage at one of the airports and it was found to contain a large mass of incriminating information. The testimonies of the dozens of firefighters who heard explosions just before the collapse of the buildings seems totally inexplicable under the official story. The sudden total collapse of Building Seven, never hit by any jetliners is also extremely implausible.

Let us now suppose that the overwhelming weight of evidence is correct, and concur with high-ranking former CIA intelligence analysts, distinguished academics, and experienced professionals that the 9/11 attacks were not what they appeared to be. We recognize the extreme implausibility that three huge skyscrapers in New York City suddenly collapsed at free-fall velocity into their own footprints after just two of them were hit by airplanes, and also that a large civilian jetliner probably did not strike the Pentagon leaving absolutely no wreckage and only a small hole. What actually did happen, and more importantly, who was behind it?

The first question is obviously impossible to answer without an honest and thorough official investigation of the evidence. Until that occurs, we should not be surprised that numerous, somewhat conflicting hypotheses have been advanced and debated within the confines of the 9/11 Truth community. But the second question is probably the more important and relevant one, and I think it has always represented a source of extreme vulnerability to 9/11 Truthers.

The most typical approach, as generally followed in the numerous Griffin books, is to avoid the issue entirely and focus solely on the gaping flaws in the official narrative. This is a perfectly acceptable position but leaves all sorts of serious doubts. What organized group would have been sufficiently powerful and daring to carry off an attack of such vast scale against the central heart of the world’s sole superpower? And how were they possibly able to orchestrate such a massively effective media and political cover-up, even enlisting the participation of the U.S. government itself?

The much smaller fraction of 9/11 Truthers who choose to address this “whodunit” question seem to be overwhelmingly concentrated among rank-and-file grassroots activists rather than the prestigious experts, and they usually answer “inside job!” Their widespread belief seems to be that the top political leadership of the Bush Administration, probably including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had organized the terrorist attacks, either with or without the knowledge of their ignorant nominal superior, President George W. Bush.

The suggested motives included justifying military attacks against various countries, supporting the financial interests of the powerful oil industry and military-industrial complex, and enabling the destruction of traditional American civil liberties. Since the vast majority of politically-active Truthers seem to come from the far left of the ideological spectrum, they regard these notions as logical and almost self-evident.

Although not explicitly endorsing those Truther conspiracies, filmmaker Michael Moore’s leftist box office hit Fahrenheit 9/11 seemed to raise such similar suspicions. His small budget documentary earned an astonishing $220 million by suggesting that the very close business ties between the Bush family, Cheney, the oil companies, and the Saudis were responsible for the Iraq War aftermath of the terrorist attacks, as well as a domestic crackdown on civil liberties, which was part-and-parcel of the right-wing Republican agenda.

Unfortunately, this apparently plausible picture seems to have almost no basis in reality. During the drive to the Iraq War, I read Times articles interviewing numerous top oil men in Texas who expressed total puzzlement at why America was planning to attack Saddam, saying that they could only assume that President Bush knew something that they themselves did not. Saudi Arabian leaders were adamantly opposed to an American attack on Iraq, and made every effort to prevent it.Prior to his joining the Bush Administration, Cheney had served as CEO of Halliburton, an oil services giant, and his firm had heavily lobbied for the lifting of U.S. economic sanctions against Iraq. Prof. James Petras, a scholar of strong Marxist leanings, published an excellent 2008 book entitled Zionism, Militarism, and the Decline of US Power in which he conclusively demonstrated that Zionist interests rather than those of the oil industry had dominated the Bush Administration in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and promoted the Iraq War.

As for Michael Moore’s film, I remember at the time sharing a laugh with a (Jewish) friend of mine, both of us finding it ridiculous that a government so overwhelmingly permeated by fanatically pro-Israel Neocons was being portrayed as in thrall to the Saudis. Not only did the plot of Moore’s film demonstrate the fearsome power of Jewish Hollywood, but its huge success suggested that most of the American public had apparently never heard of the Neocons.

Bush critics properly ridiculed the president for his tongue-tied statement that the 9/11 terrorists had attacked America “for its freedoms” and Truthers have reasonably branded as implausible the claims that the massive attacks were organized by a cave-dwelling Islamic preacher. But the suggestion that that they were led and organized by the top figures of the Bush Administration seems even more preposterous.

Cheney and Rumsfeld had both spent decades as stalwarts of the moderate pro-business wing of the Republican Party, each serving in top government positions and also as CEOs of major corporations. The notion that they capped their careers by joining a new Republican administration in early 2001 and immediately set about organizing a gigantic false-flag terrorist attack upon the proudest towers of our largest city together with our own national military headquarters, intending to kill many thousands of Americans in the process, is too ridiculous to even be part of a leftist political satire.

Let’s step back a bit. In the entire history of the world, I can think of no documented case in which the top political leadership of a country launched a major false-flag attack upon its own centers of power and finance and tried to kill large numbers of its own people. The America of 2001 was a peaceful and prosperous country run by relatively bland political leaders focused upon the traditional Republican goals of enacting tax-cuts for the rich and reducing environmental regulations.

Too many Truther activists have apparently drawn their understanding of the world from the caricatures of leftist comic-books in which corporate Republicans are all diabolical Dr. Evils, seeking to kill Americans out of sheer malevolence, and Cockburn was absolutely correct to ridicule them at least on that particular score.

Consider also the simple practicalities of the situation. The gigantic nature of the 9/11 attacks as postulated by the Truth movement would have clearly required enormous planning and probably involved the work of many dozens or even hundreds of skilled agents. Ordering CIA operatives or special military units to organize secret attacks against civilian targets in Venezuela or Yemen is one thing, but directing them to mount attacks against the Pentagon and the heart of New York City would be fraught with stupendous risk.

Bush had lost the popular vote in November 2000 and had only reached the White House because of a few dangling chads in Florida and the controversial decision of a deeply divided Supreme Court. As a consequence, most of the American media regarded his new administration with enormous hostility. If the first act of such a newly-sworn presidential team had been ordering the CIA or the military to prepare attacks against New York City and the Pentagon, surely those orders would have been regarded as issued by a group of lunatics, and immediately leaked to the hostile national press.

The whole scenario of top American leaders being the masterminds behind 9/11 is beyond ridiculous, and those 9/11 Truthers who make or imply such claims—doing so without a single shred of solid evidence—have unfortunately played a major role in discrediting their entire movement. In fact, the common meaning of the “inside job” scenario is so patently absurd and self-defeating that one might even suspect that the claim was encouraged by those seeking to discredit the entire 9/11 Truth movement as a consequence.

The focus on Cheney and Rumsfeld seems particularly ill-directed. Although I’ve never met nor had any dealings with either of those individuals, I was quite actively involved in DC politics during the 1990s, and can say with some assurance that prior to 9/11, neither of them were regarded as Neocons. Instead, they were the archetypical examples of moderate business-type mainstream Republicans, stretching all the way back to their years at the top of the Ford Administration during the mid-1970s.

Skeptics of this claim may note that they signed the 1997 declaration issued by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a leading Neocon foreign policy manifesto organized by Bill Kristol, but I would regard that as something of a red herring. In DC circles, individuals are always recruiting their friends to sign various declarations, which may or may not be indicative of anything, and I remember Kristol trying to get me to sign the PNAC statement as well.

Since my private views on that issue were absolutely 100% contrary to the Neocon position, which I regarded as foreign policy lunacy, I deflected his request and very politely turned him down. But I was quite friendly with him at the time, so if I had been someone without strong opinions in that area, I probably would have agreed.

This raises a larger point. By 2000, the Neocons had gained almost total control of all the major conservative/Republican media outlets and the foreign policy wings of nearly all the similarly aligned thinktanks in DC, successfully purging most of their traditional opponents.

So although Cheney and Rumsfeld were not themselves Neocons, they were swimming in a Neocon sea, with a very large fraction of all the information they received coming from such sources and with their top aides such as “Scooter” Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith being Neocons. Rumsfeld was already somewhat elderly while Cheney had suffered several heart-attacks starting at age 37, so under those circumstances it may have been relatively easy for them to be shifted toward certain policy positions.

Indeed, the entire demonization of Cheney and Rumsfeld in anti-Iraq War circles has seemed somewhat suspicious to me. I always wondered whether the heavily Jewish liberal media had focused its wrath upon those two individuals in order to deflect culpability from the Jewish Neocons who were the obvious originators of that disastrous policy; and the same may be true of the 9/11 Truthers, who probably feared accusations of anti-Semitism.

Regarding that former issue, a prominent Israeli columnist was characteristically blunt on the matter in 2003, strongly suggesting that 25 Neocon intellectuals, nearly all of them Jewish, were primarily responsible for the war. Under normal circumstances, the president himself would have surely been portrayed as the evil mastermind behind the 9/11 plot, but “W” was too widely known for his ignorance for such accusations to be credible.

It does seem entirely plausible that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other top Bush leaders may have been manipulated into taking certain actions that inadvertently furthered the 9/11 plot, while a few lower-level Bush appointees might have been more directly involved, perhaps even as outright conspirators. But I do not think this is the usual meaning of the “inside job” accusation.

So where do we now stand? It seems very likely that the 9/11 attacks were the work of an organization far more powerful and professionally-skilled than a rag-tag band of nineteen random Arabs armed with box-cutters, but also that the attacks were very unlikely to have been the work of the American government itself. So who actually attacked our country on that fateful day seventeen years ago, killing thousands of our fellow citizens?

Effective intelligence operations are concealed in a hall of mirrors, often extremely difficult for outsiders to penetrate, and false-flag terrorist attacks certainly fall into this category. But if we apply a different metaphor, the complexities of such events may be seen as a Gordian Knot, almost impossible to disentangle, but vulnerable to the sword-stroke of asking the simple question “Who benefited?”

America and most of the world certainly did not, and the disastrous legacy of that fateful day have transformed our own society and wrecked many other countries. The endless American wars soon unleashed have already cost us many trillions of dollars and set our nation on the road to bankruptcy while killing or displacing many millions of innocent Middle Easterners. Most recently, that resulting flood of desperate refugees has begun engulfing Europe, and the peace and prosperity of that ancient continent is now under severe threat.

Our traditional civil liberties and constitutional protections have been drastically eroded, with our society having taken long steps toward becoming an outright police state. American citizens now passively accept unimaginable infringements on their personal freedoms, all originally begun under the guise of preventing terrorism.

I find it difficult to think of any country in the world that clearly gained as a result of the 9/11 attacks and America’s military reaction, with one single, solitary exception.

During 2000 and most of 2001, America was a peaceful prosperous country, but a certain small Middle Eastern nation had found itself in an increasingly desperate situation. Israel then seemed to be fighting for its life against the massive waves of domestic terrorism that constituted the Second Palestinian Intifada.

Ariel Sharon was widely believed to have deliberately provoked that uprising in September 2000 by marching to the Temple Mount backed by a thousand armed police, and the resulting violence and polarization of Israeli society had successfully installed him as Prime Minister in early 2001. But once in office, his brutal measures failed to end the wave of continuing attacks, which increasingly took the form of suicide-bombings against civilian targets.

Many believed that the violence might soon trigger a huge outflow of Israeli citizens, perhaps producing a death-spiral for the Jewish state. Iraq, Iran, Libya, and other major Muslim powers were supporting the Palestinians with money, rhetoric, and sometimes weaponry, and Israeli society seemed close to crumbling. I remember hearing from some of my DC friends that numerous Israeli policy experts were suddenly seeking berths at Neocon thinktanks so that they could relocate to America.

Sharon was a notoriously bloody and reckless leader, with a long history of undertaking strategic gambles of astonishing boldness, sometimes betting everything on a single roll of the dice. He had spent decades seeking the Prime Ministership, but having finally obtained it, he now had his back to the wall, with no obvious source of rescue in sight.

The 9/11 attacks changed everything. Suddenly the world’s sole superpower was fully mobilized against Arab and Muslim terrorist movements, especially those connected with the Middle East. Sharon’s close Neocon political allies in America used the unexpected crisis as an opportunity to seize control of America’s foreign policy and national security apparatus, with an NSA staffer later reporting that Israeli generals freely roamed the halls of the Pentagon without any security controls.

Meanwhile, the excuse of preventing domestic terrorism was used to implement newly centralized American police controls that were employed to harass or even shut down various anti-Zionist political organizations. One of the Israeli Mossad agents arrested by the police in New York City as he and his fellows were celebrating the 9/11 attacks and producing a souvenir film of the burning World Trade Center towers told the officers that “We are Israelis…Your problems are our problems.” And so it immediately became.

As America began to expend enormous oceans of blood and treasure attacking all of Israel’s enemies after 9/11, Israel itself no longer needed to do so. Partly as a consequence, almost no other nation in the world has so enormously improved its strategic and economic situation during the last seventeen years, even while a large fraction of the American population has become completely impoverished during that same period and our national debt has grown to insurmountable levels. A parasite can often grow fat even as its host suffers and declines.

I have emphasized that for many years after the 9/11 attacks I paid little attention to the details and had only the vaguest notion that there even existed an organized 9/11 Truth movement. But if someone had ever convinced me that the terrorist attacks had been false-flag operations and someone other than Osama had been responsible, my immediate guess would have been Israel and its Mossad.

Certainly no other nation in the world can remotely match Israel’s track-record of remarkably bold high-level assassinations and false-flag attacks, terrorist and otherwise, against other countries, even including America and its military. Furthermore, the enormous dominance of Jewish and pro-Israel elements in the American establishment media and increasingly that of many other major countries in the West has long ensured that even when the solid evidence of such attacks was discovered, very few ordinary Americans would ever hear those facts.

The history of military and terrorist attacks is even more striking. One of history’s largest terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely destroyed the structure. In the famous Lavon Affair of 1954, Israeli agents launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Western targets in Egypt, intending to have those blamed on anti-Western Arab groups.

There are strong claims that in 1950 Israeli Mossad agents launched a wave of false-flag terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad, successfully using those violent methods to help persuade Iraq’s thousand-year Jewish community to emigrate to the Jewish state. In 1967, Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty, intending to leave no survivors, and ultimately killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack reached our Sixth Fleet and it was called off.

The enormous extent of pro-Israel influence in world political and media circles meant that none of these brutal attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down the memory hole, so that today probably no more than one in a hundred Americans is even aware of them. Furthermore, most of these incidents came to light due to chance circumstances, so we may easily suspect that many other attacks of a similar nature have never become part of the historical record.

Once we accept that the 9/11 attacks were probably a false-flag operation, a central clue to the likely perpetrators has been their extraordinary success in ensuring that such a wealth of enormously suspicious evidence has been totally ignored by virtually the entire American media, whether liberal or conservative, left-wing or right-wing.

The only other such extreme cases that come to my mind almost invariably involve either Jewish issues or Israel. For example, virtually no Americans are today aware of the close Nazi-Zionist economic partnership of the 1930s that played a crucial role in the establishment of the State of Israel. Similarly, although our Western media has enshrined it as one of the central events of the twentieth century, there seems a good likelihood that the Jewish Holocaust of the Second World War is either substantially or almost entirely fraudulent. Even highly successful false-flag terrorist operations will tend to leave behind a certain number of individual clues, and possessing the media power to cause that evidence to vanish from perceived reality is an extremely important tool for such operations.

In the particular case at hand, the considerable number of zealously pro-Israel Neocons situated just beneath the public surface of the Bush Administration in 2001 could have greatly facilitated both the successful organization of the attacks and their effective cover-up and concealment, with Libby, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Richard Perle being merely the most obvious names. Whether such individuals were knowing conspirators or merely had personal ties allowing them to be exploited in furthering the plot is entirely unclear.

Most of this information must surely have long been apparent to knowledgeable observers, and I strongly suspect that many individuals who had paid much greater attention than myself to the details of the 9/11 attacks may have quickly formed a tentative conclusion along these same times. But for obvious social and political reasons, there is a great reluctance to publicly point the finger of blame towards Israel on a matter of such enormous magnitude. Hence, except for a few fringe activists here and there, such dark suspicions remained private.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the 9/11 Truth movement probably feared they would be destroyed by media accusations of deranged anti-Semitism if they had ever expressed even a whisper of such ideas. This political strategy may have been necessary, but by failing to name any plausible culprit, they created a vacuum that was soon filled by “useful idiots” who shouted “inside job!” while pointing an accusing finger toward Cheney and Rumfeld, and thereby did so much to discredit the entire 9/11 Truth movement.

This unfortunate conspiracy of silence finally ended in 2009 when Dr. Alan Sabrosky, former Director of Studies at the US Army War College, stepped forward and publicly declared that the Israeli Mossad had very likely been responsible for the 9/11 attacks, writing a series of columns on the subject, and eventually presenting his views in a number of media interviews, along with additional analyses.

Obviously, such explosive charges never reached the pages of my morning Times, but they did receive considerable if transitory coverage in portions of the alternative media, and I remember seeing the links very prominently featured at Antiwar.comand widely discussed elsewhere. I had never previously heard of Sabrosky, so I consulted my archiving system and immediately discovered that he had a perfectly respectable record of publication on military affairs in mainstream foreign policy periodicals and had also held a series of academic appointments at prestigious institutions. Reading one or two of his articles on 9/11, I felt he made a rather persuasive case for Mossad involvement, with some of his information already known to me but much of it not.

Since I was very busy with my software work and had never spent any time investigating 9/11 or reading any of the books on the topic, my belief in his claims back then was obviously quite tentative. But now that I have finally looked into the topic in much greater detail and done a great deal of reading, I think it seems quite likely that his 2009 analysis was entirely correct.

I would particularly recommend his long 2011 interview on Iranian Press TV, which I first watched just a couple of days ago. He came across as highly credible and forthright in his claims:

Sabrosky focused much of his attention upon a particular segment of a Dutch documentary film on the 9/11 attacks produced several years earlier. In that fascinating interview, a professional demolition expert named Danny Jowenko who was largely ignorant of the 9/11 attacks immediately identified the filmed collapse of WTC Building 7 as a controlled-demolition, and the remarkable clip was broadcast worldwide on Press TV and widely discussed across the Internet.

And by a very strange coincidence, just three days after Jowenko’s broadcast video interview had received such heavy attention, he had the misfortune to die in a frontal collision with a tree in Holland. I’d suspect that the community of professional demolition experts is a small one, and Jowenko’s surviving industry colleagues may have quickly concluded that serious misfortune might visit those who rendered controversial expert opinions on the collapse of the three World Trade Center towers.

Meanwhile, the ADL soon mounted a huge and largely successful effort to have Press TV banned in the West for promoting “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,” even persuading YouTube to entirely eliminate the huge video archive of those past shows, notably including Sabrosky’s long interview.

Most recently, Sabrosky provided an hour-long presentation at this June’s Deep Truth video panel conference, during which he expressed considerable pessimism about America’s political predicament, and suggested that the Zionist control over our politics and media had grown even stronger over the last decade.

Journalist Christopher Bollyn was one of the first writers to explore the possible Israeli links to the 9/11 attacks, and the details contained in his long series of newspaper articles are often quoted by other researchers. In 2012, he gathered together this material and published it in the form of a book entitled Solving 9-11, thereby making his information on the possible role of the Israeli Mossad available to a much wider audience, with a version being available online. Unfortunately his printed volume severely suffers from the typical lack of resources available to the writers on the political fringe, with poor organization and frequent repetition of the same points due to its origins in a set of individual articles, and this may diminish its credibility among some readers. So those who purchase it should be forewarned about these serious stylistic weaknesses.

Probably a much better compendium of the very extensive evidence pointing to the Israeli hand behind the 9/11 attacks has been more recently provided by French journalist Laurent Guyénot, both in his 2017 book JFK-9/11: 50 Years of the Deep State and also his 8,500 word article “9/11 was an Israeli Job”, published concurrently with this one and providing a far greater wealth of detail than is contained here. While I would not necessarily endorse all of his claims and arguments, his overall analysis seems fully consistent with my own.These writers have provided a great deal of material in support of the Israeli Mossad Hypothesis, but I would focus attention on just one important point. We would normally expect that terrorist attacks resulting in the complete destruction of three gigantic office buildings in New York City and an aerial assault on the Pentagon would be an operation of enormous size and scale, involving very considerable organizational infrastructure and manpower.

In the aftermath of the attacks, the US government undertook great efforts to locate and arrest the surviving Islamic conspirators, but scarcely managed to find a single one. Apparently, they had all died in the attacks themselves or otherwise simply vanished into thin air.

Most of these Mossad agents refused to answer any questions, and many of those who did failed polygraph tests, but under massive political pressure all were eventually released and deported back to Israel. A couple of years ago, much of this information was very effectively presented in a short video available on YouTube.

There is another fascinating tidbit that I have very rarely seen mentioned. Just a month after the 9/11 attacks, two Israelis were caught sneaking weapons and explosives into the Mexican Parliament building, a story that naturally produced several banner-headlines in leading Mexican newspapers at the time but was greeted by total silence in the American media.

Eventually, under massive political pressure, all charges were dropped and the Israeli agents were deported back home. This remarkable incident was only reported on a small Hispanic-activist website, and discussed in a few other places. Some years ago I easily found the scanned front pages of the Mexican newspapers reporting those dramatic events on the Internet, but I can no longer easily locate them. The details are obviously somewhat fragmentary and possibly garbled, but certainly quite intriguing.

One might speculate that if supposed Islamic terrorists had followed up their 9/11 attacks by attacking and destroying the Mexican parliament building a month later, Latin American support for America’s military invasions in the Middle East would have been greatly magnified. Furthermore, any scenes of such massive destruction in the Mexican capital by Arab terrorists would surely have been broadcast non-stop on Univision, America’s dominant Spanish-language network, fully solidifying Hispanic support for President Bush’s military endeavors.

Although my growing suspicions about the 9/11 attacks stretch back a decade or more, my serious investigation of the topic is quite recent, so I am certainly a newcomer to the field. But sometimes an outsider can notice things that may escape the attention of those who have spent so many years deeply immersed in a given topic.

From my perspective, it seems that a huge fraction of the 9/11 Truth community spends far too much of its time absorbed in the particular details of the attacks, debating the precise method by which the World Trade Center towers in New York were brought down or what actually struck the Pentagon. But these sorts of issues seem of little ultimate significance.

I would argue that the only important aspect of these technical issues is whether the overall evidence is sufficiently strong to establish the falsehood of the official 9/11 narrative and also demonstrate that the attacks must have been the work of a highly sophisticated organization with access to advanced military technology rather than rag-tag band of 19 Arabs armed with box-cutters. Beyond that, none of those details matter.

In that regard, I believe that the volume of factual material collected by determined researchers over the last seventeen years has easily met that requirement, perhaps even ten or twenty times over. For example, even agreeing upon a single particular item such as the clear presence of nano-thermite, a military-grade explosive compound, would immediately satisfy those two criteria. So I see little point in endless debates over whether nano-thermite was used, or nano-thermite plus something else, or just something else entirely. And such complex technical debates may serve to obscure the larger picture, while confusing and intimidating any casually-interested outlookers, thereby being quite counter-productive to the overall goals of the 9/11 Truth movement.

Once we have concluded that the culprits were part of a highly-sophisticated organization, we can then focus on the Who and the Why, which surely would be of greater importance than the particular details of the How. Yet currently all the endless debate over the How tends to crowd out the Who and the Why, and I wonder whether this unfortunate situation might even be intentional.

Perhaps one reason is that once sincere 9/11 Truthers do focus on those more important questions, the vast weight of the evidence clearly points in a single direction, implicating Israel and its Mossad intelligence service, with the case being overwhelmingly strong in motive, means, and opportunity. And leveling accusations of blame at Israel and its domestic collaborators for the greatest attack ever launched against America on our own soil entails enormous social and political risks.

But such difficulties must be weighed against the reality of three thousand American civilian lives and the subsequent seventeen years of our multi-trillion-dollar wars, which have produced tens of thousands of dead or wounded American servicemen and the death or displacement of many millions of innocent Middle Easterners.

The members of the 9/11 Truth movement must therefore ask themselves whether or not “Truth” is indeed the central goal of their efforts.

Posted in USA, ZIO-NAZIComments Off on The Case That 9/11 Was an ‘Israeli’ Attack on the US Is ‘Overwhelmingly Strong’

Hilarious! Euro-Poodles Were Not Told of Trump’s Syria Withdrawal in Advance, Learned of It From the Media

UK and France have troops of their own illegally in Syria alongside the US. UK has a platoon of SAS commandos or so in Syria’s south at Al-Tanf, and France has a few hundred of soldiers in the east with the Kurds.

Despite that Trump did not tell Macron, May and their defense officials, who earlier this year also helped him cruise-missile Syria, that he’s withdrawing in advance. They had to learn about it from the media like the rest of us:

High level Turkish official: Trump told Erdogan he was planning to pull troops out of Syria, when the 2 spoke on the phone on Dec 14.
[that’s not exactly telling Erdogan military action in NE Syria is “unacceptable” as the Pentagon stated on Dec 12]

Rym Momtaz ريم ممتاز

✔@RymMomtaz

French diplomatic source: France was not consulted with, or warned about the US decision to withdraw troops from Syria.
[France has troops in Syria, and is a partner in the anti-ISIS coalition]

European officials, who have troops serving as part of the US-led anti-IS coalition in Syria, suggested they were blindsided by the abrupt decision, even if notified. “No, do you? Does anyone?” one European official, speaking with evident frustration, responded when asked if he had any guidance to offer on the US decision.

It couldn’t have happened to a better bunch! He sure showed them their place. Since they don’t have a backbone they shouldn’t be treated like they do.

Since then France has said that they’re leaving too.

Posted in USA, Europe, SyriaComments Off on Hilarious! Euro-Poodles Were Not Told of Trump’s Syria Withdrawal

NOVANEWS

Four stowaways from Nigeria have been arrested in the United Kingdom after special forces stormed a cargo ship off the country’s coast.

The Nigerian stowaways, who are suspected migrants had reportedly threatened staff on-board.

Special Boat Service (SBS) operatives from Sabre Squadron fast-roped from helicopters on to the ship, which had been sailing in the Thames Estuary, Sky News reported. The operation lasted around 25 minutes and no one on-board was injured.

Essex Police said the vessel was taken to the Port of Tilbury and four men have been arrested under the Immigration Act. The ship arrived at the Port of Tilbury in the early hours of Saturday at just after 4.20am.

Officers boarded the 236-metre long cargo ship, called the Grande Tema, shortly after 11pm on Friday. Its operator, Grimaldi Lines, had earlier reported that four stowaways armed with iron tubes had called for the crew to navigate closer to the coast. The company’s spokesman Paul Kyprianou told Sky News:

“The vessel was coming from Nigeria. They managed to escape from the cabin and started threatening the crew, requesting to have the vessel navigate very close to the coast. We understand they wanted to jump and reach the British coast.”

He added that the crew locked themselves in the bridge of the vessel after the migrants had picked up potentially harmful objects. “They managed to get whatever they could find on the vessel pieces of iron, tubes and things like that and this is what they used in order to threaten,” Kyprianou said. The vessel had been travelling eastwards through the English Channel when the migrants were discovered on Friday morning.

Posted in Africa, UKComments Off on 4 Nigerians Hides In Cargo Ship Compartment To Escape Into UK

NOVANEWS

The unspoken US policy objective behind the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou on trumped up charges, consists in breaking China’s technological lead in wireless telecommunications.

What is at stake is a coordinated US and allied intelligence initiative to ban China’s Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd from the “next generation” state of the art 5G global mobile phone network.

The intelligence operation is led by “Five Eyes”, a so-called “intelligence-sharing alliance to combat espionage” between the US and its four (junior) Anglo-Saxon partners: UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

Western media tabloids repeatedly refer to legitimate “national security concerns” as a justification for the banning of China’s telecom equipment.

What is at stake is a fierce battle in the global wireless telecom industry.

Spy Chiefs Meet Behind Closed Doors in Nova Scotia

On July 17, the spy chiefs from the “Five Eyes” nations travelled from Ottawa to Nova Scotia for a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. (who was on a Nova Scotia tour including meetings with NS Premier Stephen McNeil)

The meeting with the “Five Eyes” spy chiefs hosted by Trudeau was held at an (unnamed) coastal resort in Nova Scotia. It was casually described by The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) as “an informal evening after intense talks in nearby Ottawa”. Nearby?

The encounter with Canada’s Prime Minister was neither informal nor spontaneous. His presence at that meeting served to provide a “political green-light” to the “Five Eyes” “intelligence campaign” against China:

“Trudeau, … dropped in on the gathering to share some thoughts about geopolitical threats [from China and Russia].

In the months that followed that July 17 dinner, an unprecedented campaign has been waged by those present – Australia, the US, Canada, New Zealand and the UK – to block Chinese tech giant Huawei from supplying equipment for their next-generation wireless networks.

CIA Director Gina Haspel and Britain’s MI6 Chief Michael Younger were in attendance. The intent of this meeting was crystal clear. The arrest of Meng Wanzhou was part of a broader intelligence strategy directed against China which had been planned well in advance.

Trudeau’s July 16-17 tour in Nova Scotia was reported upon. Sofar, the Canadian media has failed to mention Trudeau’s July 17, 2018 meeting with the “Five Eyes” chiefs of intelligence.

Screen-scan of Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2018

Failure of the US Telecom Industries

It’s what you call “Fair Competition”. Bring in the Spy Chiefs!

Let’s face it : The US based telecom conglomerates are up against the wall. The industry is in a shambles.

Moreover, the US no longer produces smart phones. Its manufacturing base in Silicon Valley has been closed down. US smart phone companies increasingly rely on China not only for cellphone production but also for the development of intellectual property.

China is not only the largest producer of cellphones Worldwide, it is a leader in wireless technology. According to an August 2018 report by Deloitte Consulting:

“China is winning the race against the United States to build a faster nationwide wireless network that uses 5G technology, billed as the mobile industry’s future. Unless the U.S. moves more quickly, it will be at a major disadvantage when it comes to creating dominant new companies in the emerging space….

Accordingly, countries that adopt 5G first are expected to experience disproportionate gains in macroeconomic impact compared to those that lag,” the report’s authors said.

U.S. companies have been sounding the alarm over a purported race against China over 5G, perhaps playing to the fears and strategic desires of the Trump White House. (Fortune, August 7, 2018)

Global Research is based in Montreal.

The complicity of the Canadian government in the arrest of CFO Meng Wanzhou on behalf of the Trump White House is reprehensible. It puts in jeopardy Canada’s longstanding economic, social and cultural ties with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Evidence has come to light that US operations against the Chinese telecommunications giant HuaWei (华为) and the arrest and detention of one of its top executives, Meng Wanzhou, to face criminal charges of fraud brought by the US Justice Department are the outcome of a coordinated campaign by the intelligence agencies of the so-called “Five Eyes” network. Read more…

At first glance, the dispute between the US and China revolves around unfair competition and theft of intellectual property. On closer inspection it is about something much more fundamental, namely frantic attempts by Washington to preserve its hegemony over this planet. Are we heading for a clash between the two titans? Read more…

After having imposed heavy taxes on Chinese merchandise – 250 billion dollars – President Trump, at the G-20, accepted a “truce” by postponing further measures, mainly because the US economy has been struck by Chinese retaliation. Read more…

After summoning the Canadian Ambassador in Beijing, China has now summoned the American Ambassador to discuss the status of Meng Wanzhou – the Chinese political prisoner who remains behind bars in Canada in spite of having committed no wrongdoing. Read more…

What Trump does not realize is that the trade deficit with China contributes to sustaining America’s retail economy, it also contributes to the growth of America’s GDP. Read more…

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